Hearing protectors are typically used in noisy environments for protecting a wearer's hearing from noise at potentially harmful noise levels. Typically, hearing protectors have two muffs or caps which cover the ears of the wearer and which are connected to one another by a headband. Each cup further typically is formed by a rigid shell that is furnished with a noise dampening material, for example a foamed material.
There is a general desire to make hearing protectors user-friendly, in particular to encourage persons that are in noisy environments for longer times to actually wear the protectors. While noise dampening is the essential purpose of a hearing protector, there is often a need for the wearer to hear certain sounds from the environment, like acoustic signals, instructions, or conversations. Further, there is often a desire for the wearer to use the hearing protector as headset for radio or telephone applications.
There are active hearing protectors on the market which have passive noise dampening properties and additionally are configured to transmit sounds from the environment into the ear cup via active electronics connected to a microphone outside the ear cup and a loud speaker inside the ear cup. Such hearing protectors are typically set up so that the active sound transmission is restricted to a pre-determined level with respect to the human hearing. Sound levels from the environment that exceed that pre-determined level are dampened due to the passive dampening properties of the hearing protector.
WO 2006/058319 for example discloses a hearing protector device including a sound attenuating body and an electronic unit having a microphone, an amplifier, and a loudspeaker, where the electronic unit is selectively activated and, when activated, receives sound from an ambient environment, amplifies a frequency range of the received sound corresponding to a frequency range of human speech, and varies said amplification such that a total level of sound passing through the body and through the electronic unit does not exceed a maximum predetermined sound level.
Although existing active hearing protectors have a variety of advantages there is still a need for a hearing protector which is of preferably high quality and durable but relatively inexpensive. Further, such a hearing protector desirably can be serviced relatively conveniently.